I don't sleep much. When I do it usually isn't for long. There are times that I can't sleep for days. Those are the times that I'm most dangerous. When I'm feeling pent up, feeling boxed in, feeling cornered, feeling the past reaching out to reclaim me once again. Feeling trapped with no way out.
We live in a world filled with random dangers. Some dangers are natural, the shark, the sleen, the ost, the larl, but those are simply animals living as one with their habitat. There is no malice in their motivations, only instinct. The larl does not kill for the sake of killing, it kills to eat. There can be no question of the larl's morality, nor the shark's, nor the sleen's, nor the ost's.
Three species of our world kill for the sake of killing. Each of the three, Priest Kings, Kurri, and Man, all beings of the highest orders, acting and reacting with intellect not instinct, who have through practice acquired a sort of moral indifference to the act. Priest Kings will at times vaporize an entire city with the nearly instantaneous destruction and horror of the Blue Flame, just as a reminder of their technological omnipotence.
The Kurri, that frustrated middle sibling, kills for the sake of being second born and unable to rise above that station. Posing no threat to the Priest Kings, his wroth falls most heavily upon Mankind. The Kurri will slaughter our kind by any means available to prove two points, firstly that they can, and secondly that the Priest Kings will not intercede on our behalf.
We Goreans occupy the precarious middle ground between the quasi-deities and the brutes of nature. We, in fact, habitate that most dangerous of places, between the intellect and the incisor, the cunning and the claw. As a natural result, we human animals have adapted to our surroundings, and very likely have become the most dangerous extant creature produced to date.
There is little doubt in my mind that when our intellect finally produces the means by which to put a weapon suitable to the task within the grasp of our hands, the days of the Priest Kings and the Kurri will come to an end. Be it as swift and merciless as the bite of the ost, or as slow and agonizing as the embrace of the leech plant, their end will come, and it will come from the hands, and hearts, and minds, of men.
Until then, we have each other to practice on, and that, is what keeps me up at night.
Knowing what we, what you, and what I am capable of.
